Eve's Strange Dream

Research had never been a straight line. Ron had understood that back when he was still an apprentice.

Especially the restless frustration when progress stalled.

It was not sharp like pain, but closer to a constant low fever, keeping the mind in a state where excitement and exhaustion coexisted.

So that by day, one could never fully focus, and by night, one could never fully relax.

Cedric called this state "the researcher's fate."

He was qualified to say that, after all. He had once been driven by that very state into a very dangerous place.

Now he stood beneath Dawn Tower with that experience, facing countless failed samples.

Cedric reached out, crumpled the draft paper into a ball, and tossed it accurately into the wastebasket in the corner.

"All right," he said to Silas. "We start over."

Silas drafted the new direction and said nothing unnecessary.

The real difficulty was not the material, but the calibration.

Cedric lingered over this conclusion for a long time before finally confirming it completely.

The route using Improved Mineral Salt as the carrier had shown exhilarating possibilities in the first few experiments.

This confirmed Ron's judgment, finally letting the stone that had been hanging over the research direction settle to the ground.

However, "carrying" and "calibration" were two completely different matters.

The former tested the properties of the material, while the latter tested the caster's precision in sensing frequency—and the required precision was so high it was almost suffocating.

Because the individual differences in frenzy frequency were far subtler than Cedric had initially imagined.

A hair's breadth off, and the whole game was lost.

Most of the first few dozen bottles of samples had lost on that very "hair's breadth."

As usual, Nigel updated the loss list in the corner, his pen tip extremely